I’ve been in the industry for 30 years professionally and before that 10 years as a hobbyist assembly language (65C02, 68K, PPC and finally x86) programmer. To pretend that the previous “4GL” tools are analogous to what LLMs can do is silly.
I am always using the anecdote that there are projects I scoped pre-2023 that I would have had to have at least one or two junior devs to do help me do the work after I wrote out all of the design specs and now I can do myself in the same amount of time with ChatGPT. That’s along with my lead/architect role of talking to the client, a lot of project management work, design documents, helping sales etc.
It’s a step change.
While I hated every single 4GL tool that I’ve ever encountered (well HyperCard has a soft spot in my heart), because it was limiting, I can use ChatGPT, to create my infrastructure (CDK, Cloudformation, Terraform), and my code based on talking to it like I would a good junior developer.
I can’t tell a junior developer I need IAC done in Node (the CDK), and code written in Python using the SDK and expect them to immediately know how to use both across 130+ different services.
I have never once in my decade plus of being over projects and having the ear (or direct authority) to hire someone said “what I really need are some junior developers who don’t have any real world experience. That would definitely help me ship faster”.
Why would I do that instead of poaching a mid level developer who can hit the ground running without doing a year of negative work (ie take time away from the team asking dumb questions).
I am always using the anecdote that there are projects I scoped pre-2023 that I would have had to have at least one or two junior devs to do help me do the work after I wrote out all of the design specs and now I can do myself in the same amount of time with ChatGPT. That’s along with my lead/architect role of talking to the client, a lot of project management work, design documents, helping sales etc.
It’s a step change.
While I hated every single 4GL tool that I’ve ever encountered (well HyperCard has a soft spot in my heart), because it was limiting, I can use ChatGPT, to create my infrastructure (CDK, Cloudformation, Terraform), and my code based on talking to it like I would a good junior developer.
I can’t tell a junior developer I need IAC done in Node (the CDK), and code written in Python using the SDK and expect them to immediately know how to use both across 130+ different services.
I have never once in my decade plus of being over projects and having the ear (or direct authority) to hire someone said “what I really need are some junior developers who don’t have any real world experience. That would definitely help me ship faster”.
Why would I do that instead of poaching a mid level developer who can hit the ground running without doing a year of negative work (ie take time away from the team asking dumb questions).